Nattering

Okay, I have sound on my PC again. That makes it far, far eas­i­er to know when some­one has sent me a mes­sage because I’m not good about look­ing to see if any­thing is flash­ing on my taskbar.

Now I’ve spent way too much time think­ing, yet again, about hook­ing up the input line from the stereo sys­tem to the PC so that I can try trans­fer­ring music from the vinyl LPs and cas­sette tapes to the hard dri­ve and then to CDs. But again, there’s the prob­lem of get­ting rid of the awful hiss­ing noise with­out spend­ing mon­ey on spe­cial soft­ware I’m unlike­ly to even under­stand that does it for me, and the fact that the turntable makes an odd rhyth­mic noise that I don’t know how to fix. Aren’t there any gen­er­al­ly handy folk around Atlanta who could just work mag­ic on the old thing some­how? I’ve had this stereo since I was, oh, 11 or 12 years old, so it isn’t exact­ly high fideli­ty equip­ment and I don’t think it worth tak­ing to a repair shop. But we do have a mess of LPs, and my broth­er-of-choice has even more, all of which are lan­guish­ing and the sounds on which we would cer­tain­ly lis­ten to more if they were on CDs.

I actu­al­ly man­aged four errands at rush hour in the sub­urbs of Atlanta in only 90 min­utes. I real­ize that does­n’t sound like much to any­one who does­n’t live here. And one of those errands involved a trip to the gro­cery store—a place I’d nor­mal­ly avoid like the plague at that time of day. The only worse time to be at the gro­cery store is right after some damfool weath­er mon­key says “snow” or “ice” any­where with­in 500 miles of Atlanta. But it was worth it today because I knew that din­ner would be ready far ear­li­er if I went ahead and got fix­ings than if sam­bear had to stop on the way home to do it (he nor­mal­ly does the shop­ping and food prepa­ra­tion because he wants to do it, but he let me do this today).

So, I:
–picked up lit­tle­fire­fae
–retrieved sam­bear’s PDA from where it was lan­guish­ing at a doc­tor’s office. Any­thing he has for­got­ten since Mon­day night can be blamed on the gap­ing hole it left in his life.
–went to Kroger, got every­thing on my list and very few things that weren’t on my list (despite the con­stant chat­ter from lit­tle­fire­fae about the vast num­ber of things she need­ed right away, like fairy stick­ers and three kinds of hair gel and col­or­ing books and sticky buns and poster board and—well, you get the idea, right?). There was only one actu­al human cashier work­ing a non-express lane, and I had a LOT more than 15 items. The line for the one non-express human cashier was fright­en­ing, and I will not go into an express lane with more than the pre­scribed num­ber of items, so I went to the self-scan lanes. The sk8tr boi work­ing the sor­ta-check­out stand there came up and informed me (in an extreme­ly con­de­scend­ing tone) that it was not pos­si­ble for me to use the self-scan for as many items as I had. I ver­i­fied that he was­n’t say­ing that it was­n’t allowed, he was claim­ing that it just was­n’t pos­si­ble. I pro­ceed­ed to demon­strate that yes, it was quite pos­si­ble. I don’t think he appre­ci­at­ed that. Butt muppet.
–then went and got the items on hold at the library. All of their self-scan things were busy, so an actu­al human library clerk scanned things for me. That’s unusu­al any­more. And slow­er, to be hon­est. This is, of course, why there are four self-scan machines and only one place for a human to work. Appar­ent­ly, she’s large­ly present so that she can col­lect fines, but she can indeed check out mate­ri­als, too.

I real­ize that it seems sil­ly to even men­tion this to most peo­ple, but I am very, very pam­pered thanks to sam­bear. I don’t usu­al­ly have to deal with the rush hour at all, peri­od. And today I drove in both morn­ing and after­noon rush hours, as real_pochacco had a 9am appoint­ment today, too. I end­ed up dri­ving twice as far as I’d planned to for that one, as he’d left his glass­es at home (he isn’t quite used to them yet) and I was­n’t going to have him going through the day with­out them. So I feel a strange mix­ture of petu­lance, fatigue, and pride right now. I did it with­out tak­ing my sec­ond dose of Provig­il for the day (because I for­got to take it).

Tomor­row is my “day off” because shad­owkatt does vol­un­teer work all day, and I usu­al­ly get the house all to myself while the oth­er two kids are at school. But I do believe it is prob­a­bly the best time for me to take the car­pet clean­er back up the road to god­dessin­ga and greyknight, who have been mar­velous­ly patient while we’ve bor­rowed it. Would that work for you, GiG? Must put CDs and books on tape in the car…